Give young leaders the tools they need

Leadership begins early. Present its building blocks to those who show promise, and you’ll see whether their inclinations and abilities develop.

Dwight D. Eisenhower showed hints of greatness as a young boy. Once, during a family reunion, the child faced an ornery goose that kept charging him.

Eisenhower’s Uncle Luther gave him a broom handle and showed him how to use it, whereupon the child returned to the barnyard, stared down the fowl and then gave it a few smacks, sending it into retreat.

“This all turned out to be a rather good lesson for me,” he later wrote, “because I quickly learned never to negotiate with an adversary except from a position of strength.”

Eisenhower and his brothers loved to re-enact battles, and they eventually wound up defending the family’s honor against insults from more well-heeled classmates in high school.

In fact, Eisenhower became renowned as a schoolboy scrapper after taking care of the class bully. Once on the playground, the bully started swinging a rope with a metal bolt at the end, daring anyone to try to stop him. Eisenhower immediately jumped out of the crowd, tackled him and chased him away.

“From that time on,” said a classmate, “whenever there was any kind of trouble on the school grounds, [the students] always wailed, ‘Ike, Ike, Ike.’”

Lesson: Watch for young leaders and cultivate them.

—Adapted from Eisenhower: A Biography, John Wukovits, Palgrave Macmillan.

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